Category: Miscellaneous

I absolutely love the Christmas/Yule/Winter Holiday season, and one of my favorite parts of the season is sending and receiving holiday cards. I kind of go a bit nuts hanging all my cards around doorframes and displaying them nicely. I may also have spreadsheets for all the people I plan on sending cards to. (Though really that’s just for efficiency sake as mail merge is your friend for printing address labels when sending a lot of cards.)

If you would like to receive a card, I’ve created this handy form for privately collecting mailing information. Yes, I know it’s only November but it takes me a while to write out all the cards. Obviously, this information will not be shared, though it will likely be used in following years for my own list of people to send cards to. Also, you don’t have to use your real name if you don’t want to. I will address the card to whatever name you prefer, as long as the post office will take it. (For international mail, you do need a first and last name.)read more

I was at Anime Next a few weeks ago. The con itself was pretty decent, but I had a memorable interaction with one of the vendors in the Dealer’s Room that stuck with me as an example of how not to do business. I had been going around the various booths looking for a stuffed animal for my sister, and potentially one or two for myself. (You can never have too many stuffed animals.) There was a Chinese couple running a large corner booth that had some adorable stuffed animals. I’d already spoken to the wife, who’d greeted me when I walked up. There was a cow keychain that I was going to get for my friend Matan and I was going through their larger plushes debating which one I wanted to get for myself… until the husband butted in.read more

I’ve started out on an interesting new venture: Patreon. I come from a mostly fanfiction background, so the idea of taking money for my work is still a little new and weird for me, but I do plan to eventually maybe transition into writing full-time so this is a sort of second step in that direction. (The first step, of course, being the anthologies I’ve been published in.) All of the money actually goes toward production costs, so it’s not like the money is really going to me, but maybe one day some might.read more

By the time you read this, I will (hopefully) be recovering from my hysterectomy. Yep, you read that right. Hysterectomy. I’m in my early 30’s so I’m not exactly the normal group for this kind of surgery. It wasn’t exactly in my plans when I went to my new gynecologist trying to get an explanation for the pelvic pain I’ve had for years. I’d been through four previous gynecologists who assured me that “oh, that level of pain is normal” while I was throwing back multiple layers of painkillers once a month and unable to sleep on my stomach from the pain. Hell, poking me in the stomach in the wrong spot could make me double over.read more

I’ve had marketing on the brain of late as BishounenCon, Yaoi North, and RainbowCon all loom near like the trifecta of gay convention doom. My day job, aside from being a bad-ass code monkey, deals with social media and support chat. That’s part of the fun of working at a start-up. There’s only so many people to do so many jobs. Not to brag, but we’ve got awesome customer service. We have the kind of customer service that customers compliment us on.

The thing is, good customer service isn’t hard. You need to do three things:read more